I registered on HTS IRC and by running a WHOIS on myself... I can see my IP. Is that because it's me who's asking the info about me or can everybody see my IP? Everyone being able to see my IP on a site of this nature sounds dangerous o_O so I'm not logging in at all until I am sure that my IP is not visible to anybody. If they CAN see it atm... how do I change that?

The only people who can see your IP on the IRC are yourself and IRC opers. Normal users have no access to that. All they can see is nick!name@ipmask. IP masks normally look something like this, D82D5EED.F9EAD6F9.466168C.IP or @HTS-27427FB5.gv.shawcable.net.

Realistically, the most someone could get out of that would be your ISP. A lot of the time, your IP mask will reveal a college that you go to or for me, 'comcast' because that's my ISP. Nothing to worry about really. And besides, unless you've some sort of server from your home network, no one will be able to do anything with your IP.

What's dangerous about others knowing your IP anyway? Afraid they'll get your name and come show up at your door? That they might somehow connect to you using a RAT?

The most they could do is a denial of service, and even then it's so easy to brush those off these days it's pathetic. I wouldn't worry about anything. Like an above user said, only someone given the power to could see your IP. Even then the most they would do is issue an IP ban.

If it still bothers you, you could consider either an application set or system wide proxy.

I remember having the same thought at first. Never used IRC much before I came to HTS. However, mShred is spot on with all of the details and information. What I did, instead of posting a forum topic was to simply do a /whois on other users and noticed the IP's being masked. Afaik HTS uses Unreal IRC, which will use three separate keys called cloak keys to encrypt your IP. These keys are kept server side and never revealed, for two reasons. 1, to make different IRC's encryption output different, and 2, to prevent a bruteforce approach to find the password using those specified keys.

UnrealIRCD wrote:3.1 - Cloaking

Cloaking is a way to hide the real hostname of users, for example if your real host is d5142341.cable.wanadoo.nl, it will be shown (in join, part, whois, etc) as rox-2DCA3201.cable.wanadoo.nl. This feature is useful to prevent users flooding each other since they can't see the real host/IP.

This is controlled by usermode +x (like: /mode yournick +x), admins can also force +x to be enabled by default, or make it so users can never do -x.

A cloaked host is generated by a cloaking module (you are required to have one loaded), currently there's only 1 module included:cloak: This is the official cloaking module since 3.2.1, it is much more secure than the old algorithm, it uses md5 internally and requires you to have 3 set::cloak-keys:: consisting of mixed lowercase (a-z), uppercase (A-Z) and digit (0-9) characters [eg: "AopAS6WQH2Os6hfosh4SFJHs"]. See example.conf for an example.

Cloak keys MUST be the same on ALL SERVERS in a network. Also cloak keys should be kept SECRET because it's possible to decode the original host if you know the keys (which makes umode +x useless).

Hint: If you are on *NIX and have to create new cloak keys, you can run './unreal gencloak' in your shell, which will output 3 random strings that you can use.